How Does Trump’s Federal Takeover End?

Date:2025-08-19 08:12:10 Category:politics Views:1 Comment:0

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One week after Donald Trump’s federal takeover of Washington, D.C., the militarization of the city is escalating.

Trump now says that he expects Congress to allow him to maintain control of D.C. police after a legally mandated 30-day limit. Members of the National Guards of Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, and West Virginia will soon be joining the D.C. National Guard in the streets. Humvees posted at places such as Union Station make the capital look more like the Green Zone in Baghdad than the place you get off the Amtrak. Federal agents appear to have torn down a political sign in a liberal neighborhood and refused to identify themselves or their agencies in confrontations. Although the Army initially said that the Guard would neither carry weapons nor make arrests, a Guard spokesperson told NPR yesterday, “Guard members may be armed consistent with their mission and training.”

What exactly is their mission and training, though? National Guard troops prepare for civil unrest, which is why they’re frequently called up when major protests break out. But D.C. isn’t seeing big demonstrations—certainly not before Trump’s takeover, and not really since, either, despite some smaller protests by residents.

As for the mission, that’s even more obscure. Last Monday, Trump said that the plan was to “liberate” D.C. from crime. Depending on who you believe, the takeover was triggered by the president’s desire to change the subject away from Jeffrey Epstein, a reflexive reaction to a Fox News segment about D.C., or anger about an attempted carjacking involving a former DOGE staffer. But Trump cited no acute emergency, and he hasn’t explained what the goal is. With no stated objective, there can be no end point. (It can’t be that crime ceases to exist, an impossible goal.) That raises the scary prospect that it could just go on forever—or slide into martial law around the country.

The past week has seen a lively meta-debate about crime data, in which some people point out that crime is down sharply from two years ago and even more drastically from 30 years ago, while others emphasize that D.C. still sees more murders than some other big cities. (None of this is necessarily in conflict.) Still others question—sometimes in good faith, sometimes in bad—how accurate the available statistics are.

But this is all a little beside the point. Nothing about these deployments suggests that they will durably solve any of the real problems. The Guard isn’t trained for routine police work. The head of the Drug Enforcement Administration whom Trump tried to install atop the Metropolitan Police Department has no experience in municipal policing. The Washington Post’s mapping shows that federal officers are mostly not in the district’s highest-crime neighborhoods. Immigration arrests are, however, up sharply.

D.C. residents are hardly unfamiliar or uncomfortable with men and women in uniform. Civilians ride the Metro with service members, work with them in federal offices, or serve them in restaurants. Several military facilities are located in the city, and the Pentagon is just over the Potomac in Virginia. Yet many people are rattled and upset by the takeover. To choose one rough metric, restaurant reservations are down significantly. If the idea was to make residents feel safe, it isn’t working. If the idea was to intimidate them, however, it might be.

Legally, Trump has control over the D.C. National Guard, and he also has the power to temporarily take over D.C. policing in a declared emergency (even if he hasn’t actually identified any such circumstance). The addition of Guard troops from elsewhere is curious because, as the journalist Philip Bump reports, they come from states with cities more dangerous than D.C. Jackson, Mississippi, has the highest murder rate in the nation, compared with cities of the same size or larger. But the troops also come from states with Republican governors, making them into a force whose leaders are presumably more politically loyal to the president. The Associated Press delicately noted, “It’s unclear why additional troops are needed.”

The unique status of the District of Columbia gives Trump more power to put soldiers in the streets. The bounds of the law have still held so far. When the Justice Department tried to install an emergency police commissioner, supplanting the current police chief, the city sued, and the administration backed down. But Trump and some of his allies are eager to move into other states where their authority is not so clear.

“President Trump doesn’t have a limitation on his authority to make this country safe again,” border czar Tom Homan said last week. “There’s no limitation on that.” That’s patently false, but it appears to be the animating force of administration actions. The Constitution and U.S. laws establish no such thing as martial law, and a president’s power to use federal troops inside the country is circumscribed. Trump did not outline what authority he might claim for similar actions elsewhere, but in his announcement last week, he said he’d look at taking over New York and Chicago next. “I think that this is an experiment that’s probably needed in a lot of the Democrat-run cities in America,” Representative James Comer, a Kentuckian close to the White House, said recently. Trump and his allies have long been focused on Philadelphia, Baltimore, and St. Louis as well.

Nearly every major city is run by a Democrat, which makes them ripe targets for politicking and also for retribution. A group of Border Patrol agents showed up last week at a political rally in Los Angeles held by Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat and outspoken Trump critic, in what many of those present took as attempted intimidation. (“Our law enforcement operations are about enforcing the law—not about Gavin Newsom,” a Department of Homeland Security official said in a social-media post.)

What’s happening doesn’t look like a carefully regimented and organized attempt at standing up a military dictatorship. Trump seldom acts with that sort of discipline. Instead, it looks like an improvisational and opportunistic grab of power—Trump seeing what he can get away with and what he can normalize. With no stated goal, and with an acquiescent Congress and Supreme Court, the country could end up with the U.S. military occupying its major cities before most Americans realize what’s happening.

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